Garrison, William Lloyd | Christopher Castiglia (essay date spring 2002)
Christopher Castiglia (essay date spring 2002)
SOURCE: Castiglia, Christopher. “Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth.” American Literary History 14, no. 1 (spring 2002): 32-59.
[In the following essay, Castiglia explores the dynamics of American social reformist discourse as mediated through a scheme of white sympathy and virtuous black suffering, using Garrison's writing and speeches as principal sources.]
How social order became understood in relation to the description and reform of specific types of citizens' interiority (their “natures” or “characters,” emanations of the “deep” self) is a topic central to understanding how social reform affected public opinion in the nineteenth-century US and how it continues to shape American social life to this day. Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977), famously places the “inward turn” of state control at...
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